Friday, August 08, 2008

Self Understanding

In the search for self empowerment we first must be able to understand ourselves before we can make sense of how to navigate our surroundings. Unfortunately for us, the process of understanding ourselves is a complex systematical series of tearing through layers of experiences that would make an onion jealous. Our life path is created through the experiences we have lived and how we have internalized these experiences. Perception of pleasure or pain within the experience will dictate our movement towards or away from experiencing similar outcomes. Through our previous experiences and our level of personal understanding, we make the decision to become self empowered or victimized.

Self empowerment is our ability to allow our ego to conform to reality. By doing this we are showing mastery over our perceived state and allowing our actions to be attached to our self esteem. In order to get to this point we first must understand ourselves, our perceptions, our reality, and have the esteem necessary to make the right decision.

According to Freud there are three main divisions of the mind; Id, Superego, and Ego. By understanding these three main divisions we gain the upper hand in understanding ourselves, therefore moving closer to empowerment.

Id is the part of the psyche that is unconscious and contains your primitive instinctive impulses. It is a pleasure oriented part of the personality that allows no delay for gratification. We all have impulses that we act upon only to later wonder what we were thinking, and the answer is that we were not thinking we were just acting on immediate satisfaction. This is the most dangerous of the three divisions because we act upon our needs without regard, therefore increasing the chances of a negative life experience.

The Superego is our moral compass that develops standards and rules developed through parental and societal norms. Through our Superego we have a personalized understanding of good and bad or right and wrong. The purpose of the Superego is to act as the opposite of the Id and create balance to our actions. The danger of the Superego is that is potentially can create missed opportunity through potential experiences because we had to think about what was presented to us while opportunity passed us by.

Ego is our sense of self and is designed to compromise between the Id and the Superego. The Ego has the harder time of the three divisions because it is constantly reconciling the demands of the mind. This is the one are in which we need to strengthen if we are to develop empowerment because it creates our sense of self, independent from our instincts or parental and societal norms.

Finding the correct individualized balance between Id, Superego, and Ego is what will allow us to create an understanding of ourselves despite our past experiences. This balance will allow us to take the chances that are risky enough to feed the Id, calculated enough to satisfy our Superego, and rewarding enough to enhance our Ego. In balance of the mind we open ourselves up to learn from past experiences so that we can move forward. Our inability to create this balance is what will facilitate victimization and distance us from self empowerment.

Self understanding is our link to living in reality which ultimately is our ticket to empowerment. Despite our past experiences, positive or negative, we will never be able to move beyond or repeat such experiences when we allow our minds to get in the way of our future experiences. It isn’t until we have a firm understanding of who we are first, that we will ever have the opportunity to hold our future in our own hands and become empowered enough to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us.